by Sudeep Sen
It is a peculiar thing when one's own poems are translated into a language one does not know. About nine years ago, my first book, The Lunar Visitations (1990), was translated into Farsi and broadcast on Radio Teheran. They were read by two mellifluous voices -- male and female -- accompanied by specially composed music to go with the readings. The end result was a production that I, with very scant knowledge of Persian, could enjoy only through the pleasures of sound -- the vocals with their deep resonant bass and soft transitions -- and music with its operatic drama.
I was told later by experts who know the language and its poetry that in fact the translations were very good. I could sense some of that -- the smooth flow, the segues, the intonations -- certainly captured much of the passion that was present in the original. Sadly for me, the only things overtly recognisable were -- i.e. when the presenters happen to mention them -- the title of the book and its author. But all in all, it was certainly a privilege hearing it in a language that has such history -- both because of its ancient classicism and its rich tradition in poetry.
Poeti Indiani Del Novecento: Di Lingua Inglese, edited Shaul Bassi (Venice: Supernova, 1998, lire 32, ISBN 88-86870-22-1) contains a generous selection of my work in Italian translations along with the English version accompanying them. Dr Bassi who has a doctorate degree on modern Indian poetry in English, chose the poems and translated them himself. He, needlessly to say, has a sound knowledge of the history, tradition and context of modern Indian poetry, vis-à-vis modern traditions elsewhere.
It is difficult for me to know how they sound in Italian, but certainly he has been very meticulous in terms of getting the words, meanings, allusions as correct as one can get. He would send me detailed queries about the smallest of phrases, twists in syntax, rhythm modes, etc. It was an interesting exercise for me -- to be quizzed in such fine-tune detail about my work.
It made me think a lot about language, the way it may or may not cross-over languages. It also allowed me to explore further the use of echoing-sound, sound as reverberation, reverberation as applied to refrains in poetry. My book-length poem, Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1994) is a good example of that. Understated refrain, so that it layers the main text with translucent parallel voice-texts, thereby adding richness and depth of tonality.
Jerusalem International Poets Festival Anthology, edited by Dan Daor and Vivian Eden (Jerusalem: Mishkenot Sha'ananim, 1997) contained poems in Hebrew, Russian and English translations of poets who were invited to take part in the festival (including Vikram Seth and me, representing India).
My poems in that volume were translated very ably by Dan Daor, who I felt had a natural feel for the sensibility my poems inherently contain. The fact that I could also hear them read out in Hebrew added to the pleasure of understanding its highly charged guttural texture.
A selection of my poems in Greek translations appeared in Poetry of Sudeep Sen, edited and translated by Kariofilis Mitsakis (Athens: Hellenic Society, 1995); and those in Arabic as Alexandria Quintet, translated by and edited by Ferial Ghazoul & Stephen Alter, (Cairo: Alif, 1998). In both cases, due to the fact that these languages have long historical tradition in culture of poetry, they can very easily and skilfully accommodate the untranslatable spaces that are inherent in the process of translation. The elasticity, the long-strung rhythms, the imagistic touches embedded in the overall lyrical narrative, of both Greek and Arabic, lent themselves well when it came to translating my work from English into those languages because my own English-poetry spans so many languages and traditions.
My poems have also appeared in other translated languages, including Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, and Malayalam. I can read some translations in their new incarnation, and that has its own pleasures, disappointments, eccentricities, and amusement.
I feel my tongue is multiply forked, and at its nerve-ends lie the spirit of my own inventive forms and rhythms -- one that incorporates both the traditional and the modern, the formal and the avant-garde, the lyrical and the experimental.
In the poem 'Durga Puja' that appears in Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (Harper Collins, 1997), I have used the classical Bengali religious cadence of Chandipaat, the actual text from where the prayers are chanted. My poem uses the same breath- rhythms, the long-line couplet form with its inherent wrap-around structures of the original prayer-form. Sometimes, I have had to embed the original Bengali words in my English poems to convey the sort of Victorian diction of the time, so-to-speak.
There are other instances in my poems where I use Indian words, such as in 'Kali in Ottava Rima', 'Box Office Hit', and others. In all cases, it came to me naturally as part of the overall rhythm, apart from the fact that some of the phrases were entirely untranslatable.
I feel blessed that I can think and compose in many languages, languages that were given to me by circumstance of family and place, by the beauty and gift of architecture, music, and the magic of poetry itself.